1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to Service Component Architecture (SCA), and more particularly to apparatus and methods for analyzing and resolving SCA runtime errors in process servers, such as WebSphere Process Server.
2. Background of the Invention
Service Component Architecture (SCA) is a set of specifications which describe a model for building applications and systems using a service-oriented architecture (SOA). SCA extends and complements prior approaches to implementing services, and builds on open standards such as Web services. WebSphere Process Server (WPS) is one example of a runtime engine that supports SCA artifacts.
WebSphere Integration Developer (WID) is an integrated development environment for building applications based on SOA. WID is the primary authoring tool for WPS. WID users typically use SCA to build their applications and services using SOA. SCA provides a layer of abstraction that hides the underlying implementation details from the user. This allows users to focus on business-level concepts without worrying about actual implementation of the services. The service implementation can be virtually anything, such as conventional object-oriented programming languages (e.g., Java, C++) and XML-centric languages (e.g., BPEL, XSLT).
WebSphere Process Server reports the states and activities of applications deployed on the process server using log files. Everything from system printouts to errors and exceptions may be written to these log files. As a result, these log files are the most primitive tool to diagnose and correct application problems on the process server. However, since all services and applications running on the process server may record their status in log files, the log files can grow quickly and become very large. This can make it very difficult to identify records of interest in the log files.
In WID, the conventional “console” view monitors log files that are generated by the WPS process server. Instead of manually locating the log files in the file system, the console view creates a live session that monitors the log files (e.g., the “SystemOut.log” and “SystemErrlog” log files) in real time. The console view is a plain text view that displays the messages written to the log files. It does not provide advanced features such as filtering and message correlation. As a result, when an error occurs, users may have a difficult time finding log messages that describe the error. If multiple errors occur at the same time, the users may become more frustrated since there is no easy way to correlate exceptions with particular problems they have observed. Furthermore, some services on the WPS dump error details called First-Failure Data Capture (FFDC) in separate files. These files can be very difficult to locate because they are assigned random names. These random names make it easy to make a mistake when retrieving or examining FFDC files.
The Test and Performance Tools Platform (TPTP) log analyzer provides another mechanism for analyzing log files generated by the WPS process server. The TPTP log analyzer is a standalone Rich Client Platform (RCP) application that displays log messages in a sequential order. Although the TPTP log analyzer is better suited for problem determination, it is not suited to WID users because it provides information regarding errors and problems only at the J2EE abstraction layer. This is the low-level layer used to implement most WPS high-level artifacts and not the high-level abstraction level that users are coding in. This means that WID users must know how the high-level abstractions are implemented in order to perform the necessary mapping from the low-level implementation artifacts to the high-level artifacts.